I don’t know if they’ve shown up in your area yet, but here in San Diego stores are staring to have self-service checkout machines. The newly built Wal-Marts have them here. So do a few of the grocery stores.
The idea is that the store can save some money on cashiers if they let customers check themselves out and pay for their products, the same way banks can save money on tellers if they have ATMs for customers to use. Theoretically, both kinds of machines also benefit the customer by giving him greater convenience and speed since there are now more checkout lanes open for use. (How often have you been in a store where they have ten lanes, only two of which have checkers and are open?)
The problem is that ATMs work but these cussed things don’t.
As y’all know, I have nothing against technology. I’m fer it. I use it all the time. I’m a reg’lar tech-no-phile.
But they ain’t got the bugs worked out of these self-checker machines. Every time I use one it ends up as a frustrating experience. The other day I was at Wal-Mart and decided to complain to the manager about the experience (about the fourth or fifth bad one I’d had with their machines), telling him that the machines were poorly designed and that, although I was supportive of their efforts to introduce them and a technology fan, I would take my business elsewhere if I had to either use such frustratingly designed machines or wait through long lines now that they had fewer checkers.
If enough people tell them things like that, they may fix things.
After leaving the store, I started thinking about what exactly was frustrating about the devices. Basically, they’re too complex, but where does the source of the problem lie? It seemed to me that there are three general sources of the problem:
First, there is the bagging process. When you swipe a product over the scanner the machine directs you to put it in a bag in the bagging area, where an RFID sensor (or something) recognizes that you’ve done so and tells you to scan the next item.
In theory.
In practice what happens is that, for one reason or another, the RFID sensor doesn’t recognize that you’ve put the item in the bag, and you have to interrupt your scanning of the next product to try to convince it that you’ve done what you’re supposed to.
I don’t know what function the bagging process is supposed to fulfill (presumably something to do with making sure you scan all your items and do so only once), but whatever it is, it ain’t essential because they have a "Skip the bagging process" button for folks who are fed up with the whole thing and won’t do it.
Personally, I just put my items in the bagging area without making any effort to actually put them into a bag. I’ll bag them after I’ve got them all scanned, because the processes are just to frustrating to manage simultaneously. (Which is probably why clerks don’t do both at once, too. First they scan your items, then they bag them.)
A second source of needless complexity–and this is a much more serious problem–is the number of sources of information you’re expected to keep track of while you do all this. I counted at least six. You’re suppose to simultaneously juggle:
- Audible instructions in the form of a human-sounding voice from the machine
- Beeps and boops that sound when you scan items or do something wrong
- Printed signs affixed to different parts of the machine
- Instructions on the left hand side of the main touch-screen
- Instructions on the right hand side of the main touch-screen
- Instructions appearing THREE FEET AWAY on the secondary touch-screen where you swipe your payment card
The problem is that you often can’t tell which information source you’re supposed to be paying attention to. You don’t know if you’re supposed to be listening for the voice, for a beep, for a video instruction on a touch-screen, or even which touch-screen you’re supposed to be looking at.
For example, yesterday when I was trying to pay for my items, I swiped my ATM card through the secondary touch-screen’s slot, entered my PIN, and told it that I wanted a certain amount of cash back. I then noticed that the main touch-screen (three feet away) was saying "Authorizing transaction," which to a normal human being means that the machine has all the info it needs and is calling your bank to, y’know, authorize the transaction.
Not!
After waiting and waiting and waiting (during which time the customer behind me in line noted how slow the device was in getting authorization from my bank, figuring it was a modem or line problem), I discovered that the secondary touch-screen (THREE FEET AWAY) was saying "You have asked for $60 in cash back, which will make your total $74.15. Do you wish to approve this amount?"
I’d been waiting all this time and the machine hadn’t even tried to call my bank yet!
I didn’t know that, though, because I was mistakenly paying attention to a separate and erroneous (or at least misleading) source of information coming from the machine.
This really has to change if they want people to use these machines. ATMs work, in part, because they don’t require you to keep track of so many sources of information. They have one touch-screen, and they keep your attention concentrated there or on the slots immediately adjacent to the touch-screen.
They don’t make you hop back and forth needlessly between two different touch-screens, nor do they change-off the way you’re getting information (Am I supposed to be listening for the voice now? Which screen am I supposed to be looking at? Which side of the screen am I supposed to be looking at?)
ATMs also keep together things like where the cash comes out and where your receipt comes out. Those two slots are right next to the (single) touch-screen. But that’s not the way it is with the auto-checker machine. The cash back slot is two feet below the main touch-screen, while the receipt slot is immediately under the secondary touch-screen. The voice has to tell you where to look for these things and then you have to lunge back and forth between them to get your cash and receipt.
The third major problem is that there are simply too many bells and whistles on this sucker. The process is over-built. When you’re in a regular checker lane and you swipe your card, you typically have only to press one of two or three buttons to tell it whether you’re using a credit card, a debit card, or some third kind of card that I don’t have.
Why you even have to do that, I don’t know. I don’t know why the machine can’t identify what kind of card you’re using from the numbers in the magnetic stripe when you swipe it. It certainly knows if you’re using Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or what bank to draw the debited funds from using those numbers. I also don’t know that anybody would get bent out of shape if the machine simply treated all combination debit/credit cards as one or the other. But at least you only have to press one of two or three buttons to get past this step.
Not one of fourteen.
That’s right! You’ve got to pick from more than a dozen payment options on this device! Half of them I didn’t even know what they were, and it was really frustrating trying to simply find the option labeled "Debit Card" amid all the unfamiliar, complex, and colorful icons.
I don’t know who makes these machines, but they need to realize that if you want people to learn to use something like this you have to make it AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. You cannot build a device that gives you all the options (and more!) that you’d have in a human-checker lane.
So, bright boys, go back to the drawing board and simplify. Strip down the steps the customer needs to perform to the bare minimum. Eliminate the stupid bagging process entirely. Get rid of the secondary touch-screen. Don’t put competing information on two sides of the remaining touch-screen. Eliminate the voice. Centralize all the parts of the machine that the customer has to interact with. Keep his attention focused on a single area of the machine. Don’t give him conflicting signals (like "Authorizing transaction" when, in fact, you’re not authorizing the transaction) from different sources.
Trust me on this one, guys: Less Is More.
Apparently some folks who make these machines have realized this. Mrs. Decent Films tells me that a few years ago in her area they introduced clunky, complex machines like the ones described above–and they didn’t last. People wouldn’t use them. So they vanished, but in the last few months they’ve introduced new, streamlined machines that are much simpler and are a breeze to use.
So there’s hope. And eventually economic survival of the fittest will drive the evil machines above out of the market.
